According to a recent study, the media's underweight standard is warping the psyches even of women who are not technically suffering from eating-disorder illnesses -- that's how pervasive it has become, and how much damage it is doing to all women.

The findings of this study are frightening, but also instructive.

At this site, we frequently use the term "brainwashing" to describe the effect that today's anti-plus, thin-centric, curve-o-phobic, media culture has on society.

The natural human inclination is to find a fuller female figure more attractive than a thinner one, and to see an increase in weight as an increase in beauty. The pro-curvy artistic depictions of beautiful women in every century prior to the 20th, prior to the advent of the media-industrial complex, testify to this, given that plus-size beauty was the prevailing cultural ideal. It arose naturally out of innate human impulses.

But in present times, the non-stop bombardment of underweight imagery has overwritten this hardwiring and conditioned many people to believe that emaciated androgyny is somehow attractive. This leads, of course, to eating disorders, but as this study indicates, even warps the minds of women in general whose pathology does not rise to the level of full-fledged anorexia. This indoctrination causes a mass delusion that a physical appearance that betokens ill-health and starvation is somehow preferable to a well-fed, opulent, robust appearance.

The subjects of this brainwashing (which is to say, all of modern society) think that their curve-o-phobic reactions are innate, but in fact, they have been artificially manufactured, manipulated into their present form by anorexia-inducing propaganda.

What makes this study so extraordinary is that through it, the effects of brainwashing have been identified on a physiological level. It has accomplished a biological mapping of indoctrination, a neurologic cartography of conditioning.

A phenomenon that, previously, may have been dismissed as psychological chimera has now been physically confirmed.

To see such tangible evidence of the warping of the human mind with a toxic ideal is terrifying, and should prompt everyone who reads this site to redouble their efforts to put an end to the propagation of thin-centric imagery.

However, other, more positive considerations come to mind when reflecting upon the ramifications of this study.

Based on the study's findings, one can assume that images of plus-size models, in sufficient number, can repair the neurologic debilitation caused by anorexia-pushing imagery and restore a subject's natural appreciation for Classical beauty, since the mechanism is the same (visual experience).

But the study also invites the possibility that just as women today have been neurologically damaged by the prevalence of thin-supremacist images, so women in the past were neurologically benefitted by the prevalence of size-positive images.

The ramifications of this are extraordinary. In the past, women were physically healthier, as they allowed themselves to eat whatever they liked, and as much as they liked, and thus had a comfortable relationship with food and did not damage their bodies through self-imposed starvation. But this study also suggests that women in the past, prior to mass-media indoctrination, may been neurologically healthier as well. They may have felt fitter, and more contented, and happier, as a consequence of living in a size-positive environment.

Thus, the increased prevalence of images of visibly full-figured models may not only improve women's physical well-being, but their mental/emotional state as well.

Certainly when one looks at the images of a gorgeous size-18 plus-size model like Katherine Roll, one perceives the sensual pleasure and physical delight that she takes in indulging herself freely. Her self-satisfaction is palpable. This study suggests that through contemplation of her luscious beauty, women the world over might derive benefits both physical and psychological.